Tavi and Sassy’s Founder Are Starting a Magazine for ‘Wallflowerly Teenage Girls’

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Fourteen-year-old fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson has written a lot about her love of Sassy, the teen magazine founded by feminists that was published from 1988 to 1996. In a testament to the Internet’s power, she’s working with Sassy’s founding editor-in-chief, Jane Pratt, to launch a teen magazine “for an audience of wallflowerly teenage girls,” Tavi wrote on her blog on Friday. Pratt got in touch with Tavi after becoming aware of her obsession with Sassy, and the two have already taken a couple meetings.

Gevinson writes that the new magazine “won’t be Sassy (or the rebirth of Sassy, or Sassy 2.0)” but will “use Sassy as a point of reference for the whole teen-magazine-that-doesn’t-suck thing.” Tavi being of the digital generation, the still-unnamed venture will have a website but also three print issues a year, though there is no word of an iPad app or other similarly technologically fancy thing to go with it just yet. Tavi has put out a call for submissions since the magazine “is supposed to have a ‘for the people, by the people’ kinda vibe. We want to find the best possible group of people for this project, and a wide range of ages, styles, etc.” It sounds like this worked because yesterday Tavi thanked everyone for sending submissions and invited everyone to “join the dance party I’m having out of excitement in my room right now.”

Getting a magazine off the ground, especially with a print component, isn’t an easy thing to do these days, but evidently one way to pull it off is with the help of a famous 14-year-old personality. Tavi shared some of her thoughts on Sassy in a presentation she gave at the Idea City conference in Toronto over the summer. Watch that the video.